Re: [xmca] Current edition of Theory & Psychology

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

My response to this thread is an extension of the notion of "ambivalence"
at the heart and soul of all social imaginaries.
It was mentioned that the motivating force to "keep going" without clarity
of intention or goals is the "felt sense" of social BANKRUPTCY [economic
metaphor] in the current social imaginary.  Zygmunt Bauman uses the very
extreme metaphor of "waste" in his 2004 book to stir the ambivalence at the
center of our current social imaginary.  Ingold's article I recently posted
captured the 12 century social imaginary where walking, texts,
architecture, discourse, and contemplation were all manifestations of a
single ontology. All these objects expressed a social imaginary that did
not have some of the object "representing" the "underlying" social
imaginary but rather were ALL immanebt manifestations of the SAME social
imaginary.

Modernity [the tension between enlightenment and romanitic hermeneutical
ideas/ideals] also may have an encompassing social imaginary that has a
fundamental rupture [ambivalence] in the notion of "representation" as
expressing some "underlying" reality
[realization] when in actuality the modern walks, texts, architecture,
discourses and contemplations are expressions of a monolithic social
imaginary.
Bauman's analysis of modernity [he is an "exile" from the holocaust] has
situated ambivalence at the heart of ALL social imaginaries when realized
express "order" or "structure" which requires LIMITING  formations. This is
the core idea of sociology.  Baumans emancipatory vision for sociological
imagination [in which he generates multiple metaphors] is to explicate the
ambivalence at the heart of modernity leading to social bankruptcy. It is
the reality of this ambivalence in our current modern social imaginary
where Bauman locates hope and the possibility for emancipation from the
"waste lands".
Bauman purposely is exploring the power of the metaphor of "waste" to grasp
the desolation of our current arrangements. For Bauman the metaphor of
"waste" as the by-product of our "productions" in our "garden contexts"
[another metaphor which the Nazi's used to create a social imaginary where
Jews were "weeds" in the garden]  is grasping the fundamental ambivalence
at the heart of our social bankruptcy.
For Bauman and many others who are searching for a new orientation in our
globalized planetary social imaginary the metaphor of "the suffering
stranger" travelling in the waste lands is the moral calling requiring a
response as a growing "response-ability" as a "skill" developing within a
"new commons".
We need new "practises" and new "texts" and also new discourses and new
forms of contemplation.  However, I'm wondering how central to transcending
our current social imaginary, which is now a wasteland, are new forms of
architecture which express the yearning to respond to the suffering
stranger.

In summary, the larger contexts being explored may be cultural-semiotic
imaginaries that must become realized within a new commons which must be
in*formed to "hold" the suffering stranger in our midst [difference and
alterity and weeds and waste as the ambivalence at the heart of the modern
vision of the garden]

Accountability, measurement, statistics, as our current social imaginary of
cultural and social "order" at its heart has the cavity of the suffering
stranger that is now calling for a response and a new cultural and social
order in a new commons which must be in*formed as our response-ability to
the call of the other.

Bauman's notion of "waste" and "waste lands" as by-products of our
globalized social imaginary calls for an alternative social imaginary that
exists in the ambivalence at the heart of our current  world order.

Larry
On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Ivan Rosero <irosero@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Arturo, two things coincide for me in reading your email:  1) I've been
> working for the last 4 years in the same collaboration that
> Lecusay,Downing-Wilson,Cole have written about, and 2) I too share the
> following concern:
>
> ----
> CHAT keeps operating with a process and methodological
> ontology whereby the individual and the social are inseparable but
> does not provide a clear cut language of description of how the social
> structure shapes activity or, to put it in Seeger's terms, how power
> shapes discourse (and consciousness and identy).
> ----
>
> As the authors have described, the community setting in which this latest
> of LCHC's projects has unfolded does not permit even the relatively loose
> structures that were the hallmarks of previous 5D projects --this is where
> the ad-hoc stumbling upon interesting things to do together is such an
> important component of the dual sense of "appropriation".  In the social
> space that has been created between LCHC and Town and Country there exists
> (as I have experienced it over the last four years) an enduring liminality
> that refuses to come to closure --neither LCHC participants, including grad
> students, staff, and undergraduate students, nor T&C participants have
> arrived at any definite position vis a vis what we are doing together.  The
> kids get older, new ones arrive, some teens have left, club and group
> structures change, entire families move out.  UCSD's side of the story is
> more predictable in the institutional sense of allowing year-on-year
> planning of classes and recruitment of students, as well as, of course, the
> staying power of UCSD as a much longer running process than the
> collaboration itself.  But this can only explain the brute sense of our
> continued presence, one which would be impossible to impose in any case, so
> that we still have to try and explain the delicate sense of our continued
> presence --what is happening in the space of this
> cross-cultural/cross-institutional intersection that keeps pulling together
> (in a delicate way) such a heterogenous amalgam of participants --a
> constant churn of undergraduate buddies, a more stable set of grad
> students, a constant, but slowly changing, stream of kids, Ms. V., and the
> few community parents that regularly lend a hand?
>
> You and Andy have said that there must be some kind of crisis, and this may
> be so, but if this is what is allowing the participants to come together
> anew, it is not the kind of crisis that can be compared to, say, Occupy
> Wall Street, or Greece, or the Arab Spring.  It might be that I lack the
> requisite social imagination, but the way I see it, what is special about
> this collaboration is that it holds together without disclosing to its
> participants directly how this is happening.  We have been at it for four
> years, and it isn't obvious to me why, as a T&C elder says, we "keep on
> keeping on".  This is especially true in light of severe, and recurrent,
> frustrations on every side.  For example, in the absence of UCSD students,
> homework does not get done nearly as regularly as when they are there
> --this creates a huge problem for Ms. V, who must still try to satisfy this
> community need in our absence.  Sometimes we at LCHC find ourselves at odds
> with local customs and decisions, to which we nevertheless submit in order
> to keep on keeping on.  But where are we keeping on to?  (Especially
> without access to clear-cut language with which to explain any of this!)
>
> So, these kinds of open-ended interactional spaces elicit from their
> participants a degree of patience that is rarely seen anywhere --more or
> less equally distributed!  Southeast San Diego, where T&C is located, is
> not unique in all the ways that its inhabitants are systematically
> marginalized, and it is a fact that local community organizers (I've been
> at some of their meetings) look on UCSD and charitable institutions with
> very suspicious eyes.  In the face of these realities, mutual appropriation
> is one factor, but not a wholly explanatory one for the loose
> holding-together that is going on here.
>
> Whatever the answers are, it is impossible for me to conceive of a
> satisfying explanation that does not include affective-imaginative
> dimensions.  The way I see it, the mystery here is not how power/structure
> shapes discourse/activity, it is why this collaboration holds in the face
> of what would normally be insurmountable difficulties.  Good will and
> patience all around?  Maybe, but this only pushes the question deeper into
> the affective-imaginative life of this collaboration.
>
> Ivan
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > Continuing my sharing of the current edition of Theory & Psyhology,
> > attached are scans of Deborah Downing-Wilson, Robert Lecusay and Mike
> > Cole's paper (which I have been so excited about) and the first 16 pages
> of
> > Yrjo Engestrom's paper (I have omitted the case study) which is a concise
> > synopsis of his current views on activity and concepts.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> >
> > Andy Blunden wrote:
> >
> >> That's a very interesting series of points, Arturo!
> >> Could I just ask you to elaborate a little on what you meant by "the
> >> unconscious in sign-making" and "the problem of fetishism of the sign."
> >> I guess that you are right that in almost any social context (the US
> >> included I suspect), the kind of project that Mike writes about can
> only be
> >> implemented by surruptitiously moving the goal posts set by the
> recognised
> >> authorities, by a kind of subversion, making use of openings created by
> >> manifest social crisis.
> >> As I'm sure you know, I am in agreement with your critique of the
> failure
> >> to satisfactorily "marry" psychological concepts with sociological
> >> concepts, in CHAT or anywhere else for that matter. But doesn't the
> kind of
> >> project Mike is talking about, where goals are immanent in the project
> >> itself, and the project is thoroughly and explicitly collaborative, go
> some
> >> way to addressing this problem?
> >>
> >> Andy
> >>
> >> Arturo Escandon wrote:
> >>
> >>> Just wanted to point out that there are places where you cannot even
> >>> think of implementing a simple plain standard design experiment, let
> >>> alone an ad-hoc intervention because educational settings and
> >>> institutions are thought to be mere knowledge
> >>> reproduction-distribution centers. Research is the job of the Ministry
> >>> of Education. "Joint activity"? What on Earth is that in Japan except
> >>> the illusion of freedom framed under top-down cosmological structure.
> >>> I am afraid that most of the cases depicted in the journal are a
> >>> reproduction of the cultural conditions existing in few settings, in
> >>> few communities, in a handful of countries. Am I able to implement an
> >>> intervention or mutual appropriation in the Japanese educational
> >>> context? No. Am I able to do it in "local communities", yes, but under
> >>> considerable restrictions. However, I am guessing that the most
> >>> effective interventions in local communities spring from social
> >>> crisis, not from planned activity, that is, some sort of punctuated
> >>> equilibrium in which the community changes or perish.
> >>>
> >>> I am very curious about (1) how the structural constraints and
> >>> affordances of organisations themselves shape those mutual
> >>> appropriations and how we can account for them; (2) how the mediating
> >>> means themselves are unequally distributed (knowledge differential):
> >>> in order to bridge the differences established by the lack of a common
> >>> repertoire of meanings you have to engage in meaning making, creating
> >>> in fact a new differential; (3) the unconscious in sign-making or
> >>> using activity. Educational activity brings consciousness at the
> >>> expense of bringing unconsciousness as well. I have not read a single
> >>> decisive work addressing the problem of fetishism of the sign, on
> >>> which a theory of the uncosciousness could be integrated into CHAT,
> >>> except for works that deal with the problem of "the ideal".
> >>>
> >>> Seeger asks the right questions but I believe there is much more out
> >>> there about ways of marriaging psychology and sociology to give a
> >>> better account of agency. At the end, the issues raised by Sawyer are
> >>> still relevant: CHAT keeps operating with a process and methodological
> >>> ontology whereby the individual and the social are inseparable but
> >>> does not provide a clear cut language of description of how the social
> >>> structure shapes activity or, to put it in Seeger's terms, how power
> >>> shapes discourse (and consciousness and identy).
> >>>
> >>> Best
> >>>
> >>> Arturo
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On 10 November 2011 23:41, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> The current edition of Theory & Psychology looks very special. I
> admit I
> >>>> have at this stage only actually read the article by Mike Cole, Robert
> >>>> Lecusay and Deborah Downing-Wilson, but it is a special issue on CHAT
> >>>> and
> >>>> interventionist methodology, with articles by a number of people from
> >>>> Yrjo
> >>>> Engestrom's CRADLE and also Falk Seeger, who is guest editing the
> >>>> Special
> >>>> Issue of MCA on Emotions.
> >>>>
> >>>> Mike's article elaborates on what the participants call a "mutual
> >>>> appropriation" approach to developing theory and practice. Instead of
> >>>> implementing a project design and then modifying it in the light of
> the
> >>>> reseacher's experience, the researchers go in to a local community
> with
> >>>> very
> >>>> open ended ideas about how and what they want to achieve, and engage
> >>>> with
> >>>> their community partner, learn about their (the partner's) project,
> >>>> offer
> >>>> assistance and resources and share knowledge and objectives and ....
> >>>> mutually appropriate. The article describes the results of a specific
> >>>> project which is an exemplar of "mutual appropriation" which has grown
> >>>> out
> >>>> of the 5thD after-school programs which LCHC began in the 1980s.
> >>>>
> >>>> The article is actually very moving. I personally think that this kind
> >>>> of
> >>>> work is tackling the main problem in front of us cultural-historical
> >>>> cultural psychology people today. If you don't subscribe to Theory &
> >>>> Psychology, I don't know how you can get to read the paper. Maybe
> >>>> someone
> >>>> has a solution there. But it is a must read. I will read the remaining
> >>>> articles in the special issue, but this is a real high.
> >>>>
> >>>> Andy
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>>
> ------------------------------**------------------------------**------------
> >>>>
> >>>> *Andy Blunden*
> >>>> Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/**toc/hmca20/18/1<
> http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1>
> >>>> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> >>>> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.**aspx?partid=227&pid=34857<
> http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
> >>>>
> >>>> ______________________________**____________
> >>>> _____
> >>>> xmca mailing list
> >>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> >>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/**listinfo/xmca<
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> > --
> > ------------------------------**------------------------------**
> > ------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/**toc/hmca20/18/1<
> http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1>
> > Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> > Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.**aspx?partid=227&pid=34857<
> http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857>
>  >
> > __________________________________________
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